That's what you get out of a factory model of education that values form more than function and appearances and test scores more than the minds of the children they are responsible for.
Regulate it?? Reform it?? Make me laugh!! We've been doing that for as long as I've been cognizant (about three decades now, if you define "cognizant" rather harshly in terms of the ability to approximate adult reasoning). Far as I can tell, the situation is degenerating rather than improving.
TEAR IT DOWN. Find a way to change all four tires (more like rebuild the entire drive train) while the vehicle is in motion.
Or "pull the car over" and make the necessary repairs. That would, of course, cause social upheaval and hardship on a massive scale. As parents, the majority of us depend on the public school system to do a lot more than just educate our kids. I COULD take my kids out of school for two years, and the worst that would happen is that they would fall behind on their academics because I lack the executive function to pull a functional home school for four different grade levels out of thin air (and don't remember much algebra or speak more than enough Spanish to find a bathroom). The majority of American families don't have that luxury.
The question we need to be asking isn't "How do we deal with, or punish, this kind of coercive stupidity?". Frankly, this kind of coercive stupidity is built into the system. The questions we need to be asking are, "How do we reform a fundamentally broken system?" and "What can we do to facilitate that reform??".
I can provide a safe place for three or four kids to spend the day while their parents are at work, while the system is shut down, dismantled, and rebuilt to ACTUALLY DO WHAT THEY TELL US IT'S SUPPOSED TO. I can feed them and prevent them from dying or getting into trouble in most of the myriad ways a child can come up with to self-destruct.
What can you do?? If we're actually going to CHANGE THE THING, it's going to take all hands on deck.
Somewhat off-topic, but maybe not: I got a (computerized) phone call from my kids' (very well-rated, fairly affluent compared to my past experience) school yesterday. To "reassure" me that the police had been summoned to deal with some "distasteful graffiti" in the high school boys' bathroom, and all was well.
Now, I have no idea of the nature of the graffiti in question. Inquiring among my school-aged children produced only the information that they were totally unaware that anything had taken place (expected, at least of the fifth and second graders, though I'd hoped the sophomore might know something). I thought, "Really?? I think y'all skipped a few steps in threat-assessment here..."
Only, of course, they didn't. They followed the correct procedure for appearing to be dealing with the worst possible appearance of a problem.
_________________
"Alas, our dried voices when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless, as wind in dry grass, or rats' feet over broken glass in our dry cellar." --TS Eliot, "The Hollow Men"
24 Oct 2017, 12:35 am
